New PROMETHEUS Clip Featuring Charlize Theron & Michael Fassbender

Actress Charlize Theron was on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno last night and she brought along a brand new clip from Ridley Scott's Prometheus. It features her character having an intense discussion with David the android.

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With this promotional campaign director Ridley Scott has treated the Prometheus audience like a chained-up Alien mother-beast, to which he has tossed the odd chunk of raw meat. These include YouTube videos of a fake TED lecture by a dying Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce), talking about the Prometheus myth and the need to free science from morality, and an advert for lead actor Michael Fassbender’s David-8 android.

The first trailer screened in the middle of Channel 4's Homeland to 2.7 million viewers, its appearance heralded by full-page newspaper ads. There will be no press screenings until the day before the red-carpet premiere next Thursday. The BFI IMAX has pre-sold more than £450,000 of tickets for the film, more than for Avatar or Dark Knight. Its opening day sales were £133,000, a new record. A new trailer showing a few seconds' more footage went viral and prompted an online storm about ‘spoilers' yesterday.

So what's the premise?

In a cave on the Isle of Skye in 2085, archeologist Dr Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) discovers an ancient design and deduces it is a map, and an invitation, to a particular planet. She sets off with a mismatched crew led by Captain Janek (Idris Elba) which includes Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), the icy representative of expedition backers the Weyland Corporation, and the android David (Michael Fassbender) to find out whether human life was seeded by an alien superspecies.

They discover something much, much worse. They land on a twin of the planet where the events of Ridley Scott's original 1979 film Alien took place. Or rather, will take place — Alien is set 37 years after Prometheus. Do keep up.

The prequel revisits iconography of the earlier film, including alien eggs, the hoop-shaped spacecraft on which they were found, and the giant dead extra terrestrial — dubbed by fans "the space jockey" — seen in the first film. Both works share a grimy look, even though Prometheus uses 3D technology and has a budget 20 times larger than Alien. Scott claims the two films only "share DNA" for about seven minutes, including a "private" scene with Elizabeth Shaw that mirrors Alien's notorious "chest-burster".

Does it matter if you're an alien virgin?

Alien revolutionised sci-fi in 1979, shifting it into a world of grubby industrial vessels populated by moaning, blue-collar grafters, and marrying it to David Cronenberg-style body horror. Swiss artist HR Giger's Alien was a nightmare amalgam of teeth, armour, genitalia and drool — part impregnator, part succubus, all predator — scarily barely glimpsed.

The film cost about $9 million and grossed more than $200 m illion worldwide, spawning three direct sequels (none directed by Scott), the moribund Alien vs Predator offshoots, video games and comics. The last of the "canonical" sequels, 1997's Alien Resurrection, delivered a cloned, hybrid version of Sigourney Weaver's Ripley back to earth, 200 years on from the first film.

In 2009, Scott's brother Tony announced that a prequel to Alien would be directed by Carl Rinsch, a commercials director in their company who is married to Ridley's daughter, Jordan. But swayed by an intriguing script by John Spaihts and Damon Lindelof, and the offer of a $200 million budget from Fox, Ridley himself took the reins.

The spacetastic style

Many of the spectacular sets devised by Arthur Max for Prometheus were not computer-generated but built on the 007 stage at Pinewood — Europe's largest — which had to be extended by 25 per cent for the purpose. The shocks on offer are mostly under wraps, although there's a nasty bit in the trailer involving something wriggly in an eyeball, plus that mention of a "private" splatter scene involving Rapace's Shaw. The film has received a 15 rating, reflecting Scott's wish to keep it adult, rather than pander to a family audience for bigger box office. HR Giger is known to have been involved at some point, too. The costumes, by Janty Yates, project forward from today's fashion, and backwards from the outfits in Alien.

Who's the heroine?

At a recent briefing for journalists, Scott and his female co-stars suggested that Elizabeth Shaw, who relies on faith as well as science, is the heiress to Ripley's mantle, rather than the steely Meredith Vickers. But Scott is not averse to confounding expectations. It was left deliberately unclear who would survive to the end of Alien, and in the original script the gender of all the characters was left vague, so they could be played by a man or a woman.

Sex phobia or family attack?

The Alien films have all been rooted in a visceral fear of procreation and an allied terror of sex, or at least penetration. But each of the more or less maligned sequels has taken a left turn into a different genre. Alien is a peerless suspense film. James Cameron's Aliens is a superb, breathless action film (indeed, it's the great unsung Vietnam movie).

David Fincher's Alien3 is pure horror, killing off Ripley's entire "pretend family" from Aliens at the off, shaving her head and dumping her, a woman alone, on a prison planet of killers and rapists. It's the only film in which Ripley has sex, and she ends up impregnated by an extraterrestrial (a sex scene with Tom Skerrit's Dallas was cut from the 1979 film).

Resurrection, the weakest of the quadrilogy but not without merit, is a generational saga that harks back to the "family" of Aliens, with Ripley promoted to acid grande dame.

The number of people in danger has increased with each film. In Prometheus, the very history of humanity is under threat. Not that the cycle is necessarily finished. Cameron claims he has spoken to Scott about directing a Prometheus sequel. (Scott himself plans to revisit the world of Blade Runner.)

Who's the real Prometheus?

The spaceship Prometheus is named for the Titan of Greek myth who gave fire, stolen from the gods, back to humanity. As punishment, Zeus chained him to a rock, where an eagle would peck out his liver every day. As revenge on humanity, Pandora was sent to unleash evil into the world. Pretty heavy hints there about the dangers of presumption, heedless progress, and letting the demon out of the box.

In early drafts of Alien the planet was named Acheron, a branch of the Styx and the border of Hell in Dante's Inferno. The ship was originally called Snark, then Leviathan, then Nostromo — "shipmate" in Italian, but also the title of Joseph Conrad's novel about the corrupting force of wealth. The name of the Nostromo's shuttle, Narcissus, and the battleship Sulaco in Aliens, are also drawn from Conrad.

The 'joke'

There is also one rare, cross-series in-joke. The four androids in the films (there isn't one in the third) are named alphabetically: Ash, Bishop, Call, David.